Siobhan Redmond and David Ashton

A theatre company arrives in Leith to perform King Lear. A robbery is planned, a gruesome murder committed, both of which set Inspector James McLevy on the prowl, and Jean's past returns in the shape of the avenging son of a man she has long ago been accused of poisoning.

Even more lethally, her own lost family life resurrects in the present, as a wild young actress who trails violence and death behind her, involves Jean in a dangerous complex game that gnaws at the very root of her identity.

All this grounded in Leith's gritty backdrop - the rich exotic world of the theatre meeting the harsh reality of the streets.

Book 2 in the Jean Brash mystery series.

Edinburgh, New Year's Day. An elegant female figure walks the cobblestones with a certain vengeful purpose. Jean Brash, the mistress of the Just Land, brings her cool intelligence to solving a murder, a murder that took place in her own bawdy house. A prominent judge, strangled and left dangling, could bring her whole life to ruin, and she didn't haul herself off the streets, up through low, dirty houses of pleasure and violent vicious men, to let that come to pass.

The search for the killers will take Jean back into her own dark past as she uncovers a web of political and sexual corruption in the high reaches of the Edinburgh establishment. A young boy's death long ago is demanding justice, but as the body count increases, she has little time before a certain Inspector James McLevy comes sniffing round like a wolf on the prowl.

Book 1 in the Jean Brash mystery series.